Running a blog has become far more than simply writing your innermost thoughts and feelings. Blogging has become a full-time profession for many people, a means to an end for others and an obsessive hobby for the rest of us. So when it comes to determining the success of a blog, what should you be looking at? I’m going to take you through the 6 metrics you need to be looking at.

Traffic

This might seem like a no-brainer really, but it’s the fundamental statistic to any website. There are a number of ways of tracking your traffic, including Jetpack (if you’re a WordPress user). Jetpack is WordPress’ built-in social media and monitoring plugin. But recent months have shown me that it’s not all that reliable…

If you’re website is quite large and externally hosted, you may have access to CloudFlare who records all crawlers and bots as individual page views. Look at the difference here:

CloudFlare statistics

WordPress statistics

Most people will recommend Google Analytics as it’s the most accurate measurer there is and to some degree this is true, but if you are using Google Analytics, I suggest you take a look at this post detailing bounce rates.

If you’re wanting to up the ante, you can look at paid solutions such as Moz (£70/month), Mixpanel (priced based on traffic) and Hubspot (£140/month), all of which provide in depth analytics.

Reach

Those of you who spend a lot of time on Facebook will probably take notice of their metrics indicting potential reach. This is quite important and can give you a good indication as to which content, and which posting times, work best to achieve maximum exposure.

Facebook is only one platform and doesn’t provide an insight into any of your other channels. Hootsuite and Buffer are both free social media scheduling tools that can provide reach analytics for numerous social media accounts.

By achieving a better understanding of your reach, you can adjust your content and posting times in order to increase the potential traffic that’s driven to your site.

CTAs

Some of you may not be aware of the more technical side of marketing, having been primarily self-taught in all you do (me included). CTAs are call-to-actions and they’re the little buttons you see everywhere; at the bottom of an email, on Facebook articles, next to sign up forms. CTAs are literally everywhere and it’s time you start implementing them (if you haven’t done so already).

One of my favourite CTA tools is a free Hubspot plugin called LeadIn and the reason I love it so much is it allows me to create a custom opt-in form for my newsletter whilst collection information about my new subscriber, like which page they were on when they signed up, where they came from and what they’ve been looking at whilst on my website.

Monitoring information like this can give you a really good understanding as to how people are finding you and what it is they’re looking at on your website.

Landing page conversion

This is another important one for those of you who are looking at monetising your website. It’s a case of being able to understand how many people are converting when they reach your landing page.

SumoMe is a perfect example of how to create numerous different types of landing pages and opt-in forms whilst also being able to provide you with behind the scenes analytics as to what’s happening on your site.

Lead-to-customer conversion

It’s all very well in getting someone to become a lead. Once they’ve signed up to your newsletter they’ve consciously made the first step towards become a customer but they’re not at that stage yet. Lead nurturing is the act of taking that lead and providing them with enough value that they become a customer.

This can be done through a series of emails, a series of blog posts, perhaps the pre-launch of a new e-course. Really it could be anything and depending on the avenue you take will depend on how you track those conversions.

Online brand mentions

This may not seem important at first, but it’s the perfect way to see how people are reacting to you on social media. Hootsuite is the best free tool to do this and you can set different streams for different aspects of monitoring and help you keep on top of it all.

So there you have it, my top 6 metrics you should be tracking. Have you found this post helpful? Or do you think I’ve missed something? Comment below!